Welcome to Butter Living. I'm David Butterworth, and this is a podcast about health and about getting back to our playful roots.
On today's show, we will be speaking with PhD endocrinologist, artist, and a person who I think is an incredible synthesizer of knowledge.
A man who seems to have painted an elaborate and coherent picture of biology in a way that I haven't seen before.
His name is Raymond Peat. Ray once wrote that once we begin to believe in the future, we understand the possibility of learning more and of being more.
We appreciate the unexpected, and we even anticipate the opportunity to confront it. It is in the spirit of these words that I hope today's conversation inspires thought regarding some ideal future.
And how from conception to the first two years of life can be an instrumental period in paving the way for this ideal.
I'd like to iterate before we introduce Ray to any listener that we are not advising you to do anything.
We simply hope that you go out and experiment, explore, and wonder about life.
But whatever happens, good or bad, please do not hold us responsible.
Hi Ray, how are you doing?
Hi, very good.
Awesome.
Thanks for being with us today. I think this is really cool.
As a kind of a casual way to start, I thought it would be cool for listeners to just hear what you've been up to today and what you have for breakfast.
Oh, I usually start with a glass of café con leche, a big glass with some very strong coffee in it, a couple glasses like that, maybe some orange juice, and then later scrambled eggs, usually with cheese.
So my breakfast takes about three hours.
That's awesome.
So you put some value, in other words, to how you start the day.
Yeah, it gives me time to take an hour or so for thinking what I'm going to do during the day.
That's amazing.
Ray, I think it's undoubted that a lot of people who listen to this are going to be familiar with you.
They're going to have read a lot of your work.
But there are going to be some listeners who know nothing about you.
Would you mind diving pretty deeply into your background and also maybe tell us why you're such a great person to listen to as far as health and life?
I think it's relevant that I was born in the middle of the Great Depression and grew up hearing about the Spanish Civil War, for example, and Italy's invasion of Africa,
and then seeing our neighbors, including the Dust Bowl immigrants into California,
and so seeing wandering homeless men was like a precursor to Reagan's time, seeing people on the highway with their bedrolls.
Between 1940 and 1980, that was rare, but in the Depression, it was a daily thing.
Then when the war got started, our family moved from Southern California to Southern Oregon.
In the middle of the war, we were sort of cut off in Southern Oregon.
I went to the second grade in the town of Grants Pass, but from third to fifth grade, I was in a one-room schoolhouse outside of town.
We had eight grades in one room, so I could hear all of the lessons.
When I was in the third grade, I would be hearing seventh and eighth graders' lessons,
and that gave me interest in the process of education and why they should segregate grades,
so you only had the opportunity to hear what they were delivering to each grade.
We always had encyclopedias in the house, and I started reading about education, learned about Bertrand Russell.
He was one of my early heroes, and so I looked up information about his school, his wife, Dora,
and he started a school called Beacon Hill in the 1920s.
From reading about that, then I heard about the Experimental College at the University of Wisconsin started by Alexander Michael John,
and from that, I heard about Black Mountain College, an experimental college also in the '30s.
Then I got to junior high and discovered that those experimental ideas in education had just sort of disappeared from the culture.
What was coming on in 1947, '48, and '49 was the establishment of totalitarian education in the United States.
The word was pretty much intended to apply to the Soviet Union, but what I saw from that perspective of grade school
and experimental education coming into the late 1940s, I saw things that I had become interested in,
like Lamarckism in biology, which had been a big thing also at the University of Wisconsin.
A guy named Geyer did things demonstrating Lamarckism, and I found that Lamarckism had been banned from education.
So when I got to my sophomore high school biology class, I realized it was being taught by basically a kind of crazy moron.
So I became extremely critical and skeptical of biological and political ideas,
seeing that the education had been cleaned up to eliminate any nonconformist ideas.
At some point in the 1950s, I was very aware of the dangers of atom bomb testing in the atmosphere,
and so I realized that Linus Pauling was the only well-known person talking about the dangers of radiation.
I learned that an associate of his, Terry Spitzer I think his name was, at Oregon State University,
had been a very successful researcher and teacher, but he was fired by the president of the university for writing about Lamarckism.
And because of that, Linus Pauling wouldn't step foot on the Oregon State campus for 17 years.
Finally, after the president had been gone for a while, he went back to give a talk.
But people generally don't appreciate what a crazy culture we had in the 1950s.
While I was writing letters to the editor of newspapers and such, and Linus Pauling was giving talks,
they took away his passport so he couldn't get out of the country because he was opposing atmospheric bomb testing.
The government was supporting people like John Goffman to go around lecturing.
The mood was to convince people that radioactive fallout might actually be good for you.
One of the projects to study the biological effects of radiation was called Project Sunshine.
And people who occasionally, someone, a professor or a government employee would say,
"Hey, that stuff is really dangerous."
And they would not only get fired, but there would be a campaign of character assassination.
In 1959, I was teaching biology at what was called Urbana University, functioning as a junior college.
I was teaching about the biological effects of radiation, among other things.
By chance, a lecturer, I learned that he had been invited because they wanted someone who wouldn't teach about
the biological effects of radiation.
He had been invited to try out for my job, and he chose to lecture on the biological dangers of radiation.
And the weekend after he was there, he got fired from his job at the University of Illinois.
And he and I got together to campaign to create a college that would be able to talk about such things,
that wouldn't have trustees tied to the military research, and who could freely investigate any subject they wanted.
So Leo Koch and I started working on creating a new college.
Just as I was getting things organized, and he was giving talks, recruiting students,
he got a job as a biologist at a mushroom soup company.
So I was left to take over the new college, which we called Blake College after that.
And the idea of that was to get faculty and students together, living together in a community,
and able to teach and study exactly what they wanted.
I and two or three of the teachers were the initial trustees of the organization, but we had it set up so that
both teachers and students, after they had been there for I think it was six months, would become automatic trustees.
So there was no outsider involved.
But that didn't please the U.S. State Department, because at that time the Vietnam War was escalating.
So they cooked up ways to intervene and shut it down.
Wow.
So after that, I taught linguistics for a year and decided that I would be more productive studying biology
and trying to recover some of the insights that had been shut out of biology 40 years earlier.
I decided to go back to graduate school in biology, where I had previously studied literature and linguistics mostly.
And that was how I came to be identified with biology rather than literature and art and linguistics.
Wow. And that was at the University of Oregon?
Yes. I got my Ph.D. there in '72.
That's amazing. Ray, thanks for that.
That just gives us such a good picture of where you've come from.
I want to jump right in to what we plan to talk about now, because I think we've got some really good stuff.
What would you envision as the ideal society or living environment 30 years from now?
And I guess another way to put that is if you were going to write a fiction or a nonfiction, I guess,
about the world that you would want to live in 30 years from now, what might that look like?
What I did in designing Blake College was writing a fiction about what it would be like to have a place where you could do what you should be doing.
And that's what I think living should be a matter of learning and exploring what we should be doing so that it's constantly in control of itself.
And in 1981, I started doing a series of monthly newsletters, and it was either my first or second issue of that that I wrote on the effects of the environment on the gestating brain.
And I got interested in the effects of education and nutrition and environment, etc., on the brain at an early age.
And that was integrated into my attitude towards pre-education, that you shouldn't set the curriculum from outside the people who are actually doing the studying.
But education, learning, and brain development are a continuous process. It isn't a genetic apparatus of the brain which is then stuffed with information.
But learning and development of the brain is one single process. And unfortunately, our language ties into a culture which ties into people who want to manipulate other people.
And so as soon as we start learning language in that situation, the way language is controlled by institutions starts making us stupid.
There had been a psychologist who compared his daughter's development with a monkey's development, and he saw that as soon as his daughter began learning language,
she was unable to solve some problems that the monkey at the same age could solve, showing that language imposes stereotyped ways of evaluating situations.
And that was why I was studying linguistics and psychology in the 1950s and '60s before I specialized in biology,
seeing all the effects of the environment, cultural and biological, as shaping how we understand the world because the brain is constantly being renewed and revised.
And its course gets set pretty much during gestation, but you can always revise its course on a finer level at any point if you have energetic support.
And so imagining the whole situation as you say 30 years in the future, as it's going right now, the whole situation looks like life might not last more than a couple of weeks if the Iran thing keeps going the way it has been going.
But if that can be overcome, then everything else can, in writing fiction, can be overcome.
So we'll assume that the institutions that are indoctrinating people and controlling, like the people who control Facebook and Wikipedia,
the institutions who impose their version of reality through those internet institutions, if they can be eliminated, then we can consider the actual physical limits to brain development.
And we already have levels of automation so that people really don't have to work more than three or four hours a week to have all of the food and practical needs met.
So that leaves the question of what to do with essentially all of your free time.
And I think that would spontaneously turn in the direction of communication, interaction, invention, and moving on to new problems constantly.
That's amazing. What do you think you'll be doing in 30 years, Brett?
That sort of thing, I'm hoping. Getting things going that are more interesting than the way they've been going in recent years.
What do you mean by that?
There are now new generations coming on which are starting to be more critical of the existing institutions.
And each generation is freeing itself from the stupefying conditions of the older generations.
So I think anyone who is listening to the events in the culture are going to be participating in, ready to participate in whatever new things become possible.
And one of my longtime definitions of culture is that it's the concept, the limits of what is possible.
The culture teaches us that certain things are possible and by definition everything else must be impossible.
So if you simply change your mind, the limits of what is possible become undefined and very open.
Changing your mind is the essence of living matter. The biology is changed by every experience.
The brain is constantly in development and that involves what you're learning.
So what you learn changes your structure and so your mind is changed and so the meaning of what you learned has changed.
You're changing your past every time you learn something because you become a different organism.
I love that. It reminds me of William Blake.
Didn't he say something, to the effect of the man who never alters his opinion, it's like standing water and breeds reptiles of the mind.
That sort of thing was why I was attracted to Blake because he sees the mind.
One of his phrases was the intellectual fountain.
I love that.
Ray, let's go back from this kind of ideal future a little bit to now and to some of those behaviors and conditions from conception of the first two years of life that you were talking about.
Can you be more specific and talk about some of the things that are so valuable in those first, you know,
from conception to the first two years of life and how could really being thoughtful about this beginning of life essentially pave the way for a biologically energetic future?
A biochemist, Stephen Zamenhof, experimented with brain development in chicken embryos and he found that the brain stopped development at the same time as the glucose reserve in the egg from the hen was depleted.
So he added glucose or amino acids that could be turned to glucose to the egg.
He waited the number of days that he knew the glucose would disappear, then punched a hole in the egg and injected the glucose and showed that the injection of glucose allowed the brain cells to keep multiplying right up until hatching.
And those chickens had bigger brains than chickens had ever had and were more intelligent.
And about the same time, Marion Diamond at the University of California was part of a group that was studying the effects of environment on the brain.
And it was very Lamarckian. People didn't talk much about that, but just by giving rats an interesting environment instead of keeping them in a box, just giving them some playground toys basically and a bigger box and a few other rats to visit with,
their brains got bigger and their enzyme activity changed.
And the thing that least got talked about was that their offspring had bigger brains, bigger, more intelligent brains.
And I don't know how many generations that went on, but over, I think I read that it was four generations they had seen a progressive increase in both the intelligence and the size of the brain.
And during the same time, 1960s mostly, several other types of experiment and observation were made.
Rats and dogs both had their brain development limited by excess estrogen, which lowered their blood sugar, made the glucose less available.
Glucose was essential for brain development.
So, too much insulin or too much estrogen, which activates insulin, either of those would lower blood sugar and simply turn off brain cell multiplication.
And polyunsaturated fatty acids were the other main thing that would stop brain development by interfering with the use of glucose.
At the same time, what was being called, I forget the guy's name, anyway, it was well recognized principle that rats block glucose oxidation.
So, those three things were known to limit brain growth and intelligence.
And besides extra glucose simply being added, the level of progesterone was the main thing that protected against estrogen and the excess insulin effect.
And to some extent, fatty acids would interfere with the polyunsaturated fatty acid blockage of glucose use.
But progesterone affecting the hormone balance was found to produce this transgenerational advance of the brain and it would show up as ovarian increased activity supporting increased brain size and intelligence.
Having that in mind, I was looking around after I got my PhD, looking around for places where research could be continued.
I found that the Catholic University in Valparaiso, Chile, had instituted, they were about to institute a new branch specifically to study the influence of nutrition on brain development.
And I actually got a signed contract, never did from another university, but I was contracted to direct that program.
And so, I was planning to go to Chile, but then the 1973 Nixon-Kissinger coup stopped that whole project for 30 years or so.
Wow. Ray, I have a couple of follow-up questions.
You mentioned the impact of progesterone, just so widely pro-life in its properties.
If someone were to, were going to supplement with like a supplemental progesterone, what kind of dosages do you think would be appropriate in various contexts?
Katherine Dalton in the 40s and 50s was treating premenstrual syndrome patients and menopause patients, but she had lots of patients suffering from poor nutrition who also had PMS problems.
And over the years, she was giving them progesterone injections, and after several years of having treated them just for their current symptoms, someone said, "It's interesting that your patients' babies are so superior intellectually."
And Dalton said, "That seems unlikely because women with PMS are likely to have pregnancy problems, premature deliveries, and stressed pregnancies.
And it's known that their babies average a few points below normal IQs." And so she doubted that the person was right in saying that their babies were superior.
So she studied it and found out that all of the progesterone babies were academically superior, just like the Tickhams that had better brains for being exposed to the protective metabolic regulator.
And I think she said they were typically around 130 IQs instead of 96 IQs as their older siblings untreated with progesterone.
So it was about a 34-point improvement in IQ just for that one addition. She didn't pay attention to their thyroid or protein intake or salt intake or any of the other factors.
Wow.
And it was ineffective. People had used progesterone orally for 25 years at the time, but by the 1970s, everyone thought they knew that you couldn't use progesterone orally, so they were giving it by injections.
And the solvent used to inject progesterone happens to be neurotoxic. Benzyl alcohol and benzyl benzoate were solvents that were used that were fairly toxic, killed nerves.
But despite that, the progesterone was so nerve protective, it still had those beneficial effects. So I looked for some way of convincing doctors to start using progesterone because not every woman wanted to have regular injections.
Sometimes the injection would cause the subcutaneous fat to collapse just from irritation.
So that was where I found that it dissolved very well in vitamin E, which allowed it to be taken up with fat droplets, the chylomicrons, which allowed it to get around the livers, metabolic changes, deliver the unchanged progesterone directly to the bloodstream,
where it would be delivered directly to cells in the chylomicron form. And in the cells, it happened that locally, right in the mitochondrion and other parts of the cell, the vitamin E and progesterone supported each other.
Vitamin E had an anti-estrogen effect at those subcellular, intracellular levels, the same way progesterone does. So vitamin E and progesterone were synergizing metabolically.
So I was giving this mixture to all of my friends who were pregnant. Another friend was raising Afghan dogs, breeding them and selling them.
And she said that Afghan dogs are typically untrainable because of their personalities. And she was treating -- when a dog would have pregnancy problems, she would give them oral progesterone.
And she said that the pups produced not only prevented miscarriage, but the resulting pups had bigger brains and were trainable, uncharacteristic of that breed.
Wow.
But they were abnormally independent and precocious, same things that Katherine Adalton had noticed, that her patients were outstanding in all of their academic subjects,
except of the physical gymnasium classes and art classes because they didn't follow orders very well.
They were very independent in personality, and so they didn't like regimentation of any sort. And my friends with the progesterone babies had all kinds of stories about the precocious things they would do.
The most recent story I heard about a couple of them. One of them, I think she's four years old, she had just started a notebook.
The grandfather told me that she had written out in her notebook some pages with her older brother, her eight-year-old brother's name and the grandfather's name,
and had drawn three lines under her brother's name on each day and five lines under her grandfather's name.
And he asked what that was for, and she said, "I want each of you to teach me three new things every day." He had five lines, and her older brother had only three lines.
She said, "Because you know more than he does."
That's amazing.
Hey, Ray, I'm holding a bottle of my wife's Progest-D replenishing oil, and it says it's 1.15 fluid ounces for the whole bottle.
What are your thoughts as far as how much, let's say, a pregnant woman would want to take each time she took Progest-D?
Katharina Dalton divided her patients into those who had in the whole pregnancy received, I think it was under or around 1,000 milligrams divided up in her weekly injections,
and those who had received at least 1,500 milligrams per pregnancy. And there was a clear division in their academic record.
The ones that got more were the brightest.
So is there really like an upper limit? I mean, is it pretty safe to consume?
I think it's kind of a statistical thing. Hers was a clear division statistically, but when you look at individual analysis of women who have the preeclampsia symptoms,
other people studying them and watching the effects of progesterone found that in about a third of the women with preeclampsia from the low thyroid, high estrogen, and low progesterone,
about a third of them, one injection was all it took to get the system back to normal and their symptoms were resolved for the whole pregnancy following the first.
For example, in the first two or three or four months, they would tend to bleed cyclically even though they were pregnant,
showing that the placenta wasn't making enough progesterone to prevent the breakthrough bleeding even though there was a placenta developing.
And in a third of them, one injection was all it took to reestablish full progesterone production for the remaining part of the pregnancy.
Another part took a second or more injections to get back to the stable condition.
So it varies. Sometimes a single dose will normalize the whole pregnancy, but to be sure, I think it's best to check frequently to see if your progesterone/estrogen ratio and thyroid function are on the curve where they should be.
Progesterone should rise steadily in a healthy pregnancy from conception straight up to the day before delivery or the day of delivery.
And if it steadily rises, then it's keeping its great excess over estrogen, so estrogen can't interfere and stop brain development.
Is that something that can be pretty easily tested?
Yes.
You mentioned glucose being also one of these protective factors and so important to brain development.
So two questions.
Are you saying sugar is okay for pregnant women?
And also, can you give us some tangible examples of where they might get this glucose in their diet?
Tom Brewer was writing about this.
He had the newsletter for many years in the '60s.
A couple of his followers gathered together his research and others. Shanklin and Houghton, Child Health and Maternal Nutrition was their book.
The title came out in about 1965 in the original.
But Tom Brewer was campaigning against the pharmaceutical companies who had indoctrinated doctors with the idea that they should control weight gain during pregnancy.
And to do that, they were selling their new diuretic chemicals to prevent water retention,
and along with the ideology that water retention and weight gain were harming pregnancy, creating a situation similar to diabetes.
The drug companies had indoctrinated the idea that sodium went with water retention,
so if you were giving a diuretic, you should restrict sodium in the diet.
And Tom Brewer first, and then Shanklin and Houghton showed that what they were doing was stopping brain development very prematurely
by restricting salt in the diet or even giving a diuretic to make the body lose sodium faster.
And Tom Brewer didn't emphasize sugar, but he emphasized salt and protein.
He showed that a protein deficiency was the main historical cause of eclampsia in pregnancy or toxemia of pregnancy.
And just making sure that they were getting at least 100 grams a day of good protein, 130 grams would be good,
but lots of pregnant women were having only 30 grams a day of protein, far too little.
And Tom Brewer wanted to assure that along with the protein, they weren't restricting salt, that they should eat salt according to taste.
Shanklin and Houghton's book reported two experiments in Australia in which women with signs of developing toxemia were given supplementary salt,
apart from other changes of their diet.
One group got six grams of extra sodium per day. The other one, I think it was 20 grams of extra salt per day.
And in both cases, they were immediately relieved of the toxemic symptoms just by the salt.
And the way the salt works is to allow the albumin in your blood to bind water and keep it in your bloodstream.
Low thyroid, poorly nourished women lose sodium easily in the urine. Thyroid causes a proper level of sodium retention.
And the sodium associated with the albumin binds water, keeping the blood volume up, perfusing the kidney with this good volume of blood.
And the kidney, getting perfused, stops sending signals that increase blood pressure.
Eating more salt or being able to retain it by having adequate thyroid and progesterone function, the sodium allows the kidneys to be perfused
so the kidneys stop sending the signal to raise blood pressure. Salt alone, in both cases, prevented the hypertension of pregnancy.
Having read that, I suggested it to friends with PMS who would retain water pounds, extra pounds every PMS period would be retained and then lost again cyclically.
And they found that salting their food to taste stopped the cycle of salt craving and water retention.
And then I told old friends, people in their 80s, who were having problems associated with a low salt diet.
And everyone I suggested that to stopped having insomnia and other symptoms associated with the low salt intake.
Wow. Ray, if an expecting mom were to come to you and say, "Hey, Ray, what are like six or seven foods that you would eat on a regular basis throughout pregnancy
to support a healthy, resilient, strong, flexible organism?"
At least two quarts of milk, maybe a gallon, preferably low-fat or 1% milk for protein.
That would give you, along with other things, adequate protein.
And eggs, two or three eggs a day, lots and lots of orange juice would be my emphasis to provide carbohydrates, which in itself helps to lower the stress hormones.
It acts on various symptoms, systems, along with the calcium in the two to four quarts of milk per day.
The calcium and sodium both act to lower stress and the sugar in orange juice supports that anti-stress effect of calcium and sodium.
Keeping down inflammation and stress.
And the stress hormones and inflammatory hormones are what progesterone is present to prevent.
So when you're doing these nutritional things, you're supporting the effects of whatever progesterone the system is making.
Awesome. Would you be partial to like fresh, sweet orange juice over like store-bought orange juice?
Yeah. It's important to get the sweetest orange juice you can.
You don't want to overload on the citric acid that some orange juice has in excess.
So good, sweet, fresh oranges are really ideal.
You mentioned some of the really destructive effects of polyunfetriated fatty acids on fetal development, brain development for a young organism.
Can you give some examples of -- I think some listeners might not know completely what exactly would be some examples of polyunfetriated fats?
All of the liquid fats, safflower oil, soy oil, canola, anything that's liquid at room temperature is questionable.
If it's still liquid at refrigerator temperature, then it's really seriously toxic.
At birth, a baby, a calf, for example, has a brain which is almost purely saturated fats.
And a human baby, even if the mother has been eating a junk diet with a lot of polyunsaturated fat, a human baby by the current medical definitions is usually born with a so-called essential fatty acid deficiency.
That's a normal condition for every kind of animal, for the baby's brain to be very highly saturated to the extent that doctors will say it's deficient in the unsaturated fats.
That's because glucose has the main energy source for the developing brain in providing the energy for cell growth.
It's also providing the substance to make the fats which are used in brain growth and other cell growth.
But the brain is a very high-fat organ. But when glucose is a fuel permitting cell division and growth, it's also providing the substance to make the saturated fats and the omega-9 unsaturated fats which are intrinsic to our own production.
So, the presence of omega-9 fatty acids, which is natural in the healthy glucose and progesterone-supported brain development, doctors have been taught to, if they happen to test the bloodstream and find any of these natural brain-supporting mead acid series,
they're called the omega-9 fatty acids, they're taught to define this as a deficiency of their soy oil, safflower oil, PUFA fatty acids.
So, when they recognize an ideal situation, they're calling it a serious nutritional deficiency and they start advocating giving them a formula with added algae oil or fish oil or that sort of highly, extremely unstable polyunsaturated fatty acid, DHA,
and the associated omega-3 fatty acids.
Wow. Ray, can you describe just briefly what happens when an unsaturated fat enters a human body? I mean, why it's so unstable and toxic?
Yeah, one of the arguments they're using to sell fish oil, basically, is that it has an anti-inflammatory effect.
It interferes slightly with the production of prostaglandins made from the omega-6 series fatty acids. So, to the extent that you lower prostaglandin production, that's good, but you get this anti-inflammatory effect,
but it goes with a suppression of immunity. It creates an immune deficiency condition because it suppresses the immune system. Free radical breakdown products are toxic to the white blood cells, and so you do get the good anti-inflammatory effect, but at the cost of immune suppression.
And people who have followed the actual course of ingested proof of the fish oil highly unstable type find that as soon as it reaches the bloodstream, it's already in a mainly oxidized breakdown condition.
So, it's these breakdown oxidized products that are immune suppressive. A little bit of this material is progressively incorporated into the brain, but as the baby grows, it's diluting these.
So, the brain, by the age of 20, hasn't accumulated a great amount of the omega-9 fatty acids, but after the age of 20, there's a steady accumulation in the brain of the fish oil type fatty acids, which when they break down, they produce spontaneously without enzyme action.
They'll produce things equivalent to the prostaglandins, the pro-inflammatory derivatives of fatty acids.
Isoprostanes and neuroprostanes are the two spontaneous oxidative breakdown products of the omega-6 and -9 series of fatty acids, and those do create inflammation and degenerative symptoms.
As a calf eats a lot of grass, a little bit of it gets through to its brain.
So, cows as adults do have more PUFA in their brain than at birth.
Humans eating a highly unsaturated diet, even when they're growing, their tissues are absorbing and storing some of these highly unsaturated fats, and that storage parallels very closely the slowing of the metabolic rate.
A baby at birth has an extremely high metabolic rate and an extremely low PUFA content in its tissues, and its learning ability is spectacular.
For the first few years, babies are able to learn language several times as fast as adults, and that corresponds to them having a metabolic rate about two and a half times faster than an adult.
As their tissues accumulate the PUFA, by the age of 20, their metabolism has slowed quite a bit, and then for the rest of their life, as they keep accumulating at a high rate, the metabolic rate keeps slowing down as the degenerative conditions set in.
Is it even possible for a young organism growing up to stay in a more metabolic mode of existence and keep tissue content of plants that are about low?
Can we do that through what we consume?
Puberty is one of the things brought on. If you look at plants in the summer, when a plant senses that the water supply, for example, is deficient, it'll go to seed earlier than normal.
When I worked in the woods, the foreman pointed out that you can make a pine tree produce cones the following season by whacking it with an ax.
It sensed danger and decided it had to reproduce, and puberty is similar. When the body senses that its metabolism is being slowed down, it turns on the reproductive system.
In extreme stress conditions, kids can start becoming pubescent well before the age of 10.
Lots of girls in the U.S. are starting to menstruate at 9, some even earlier.
In some tropical areas of the world, before industry was making the meat, soy oil, the traditional diet incorporated coconuts, and lots of coconut fat was a staple of the diet.
In these areas, it was normal for girls not to menstruate at all until around the age of 18, almost twice the years of proof of free development between the 9-year-olds in the U.S. and the tropical 18-year-olds.
That slowdown of metabolism corresponds to the increase of estrogen without proper opposition by the other progesterone and thyroid.
It sets up premature degenerative diseases, menopause, cancer, heart disease, lung disease, kidney disease, and so on.
Unbelievable. Would a nice little approach be to keep stress low, cook our eggs in coconut oil and butter, and get a lot of sunshine? Would that be a nice little way to approach that?
Yes, sunshine is an extremely important factor. I've learned that in tropical areas where people have the opportunity for sunshine, culture has taught them to cover up so they don't turn too dark brown.
I've had friends within lower than 20 degrees north latitude who avoided the sun so thoroughly that they were vitamin D deficient.
The deficiencies are more extreme and universal in the high latitudes up around 40 or 50 degrees north, but it isn't at all uncommon, especially in the Muslim countries where women cover up as much skin as they can.
They are extremely likely to be seriously deficient in vitamin D. Calcium intake to a great extent can make up for the partial vitamin D deficiency.
Sugar helps to make up for a calcium and vitamin D deficiency because part of the effect of vitamin D and calcium is to keep the energy system, the metabolic rate, working at a good high level.
So, combining the good calcium intake, lots of carbohydrate, and lots of sunshine, apart from the amount of PUFA in the diet, those are good protective insurance against degenerative diseases.
Awesome. Speaking of sugar and carbohydrates, there are certainly some trends that people think are healthy, like ketogenic diets and intermittent fasting or even just restricting sugar.
Would you be willing to comment on the effect that these kinds of diets might have on developing fetus?
Yes, some of those fad diets are based on experiments in rodents. One of the things people usually get wrong about mouse and rat studies is that they are nocturnal animals.
When you are studying them in the daytime, that is the time they normally would be sleeping. If you are bothering them in the daytime, that is a special intense stress for their systems.
So, people typically get their metabolism upside down as far as stress and estrogen and such go.
The darkness itself, not related to the sunlight and vitamin D production, but just the absence of environmental light, turns on stress hormones.
Partly that is because the red component of light has an electron quenching effect. It calms excited electrons that have been put into that excited state by inflammation or metabolic inhibitors, such as the fatty acids.
One group of experimenters put a tube in the veins of people who were in the sleep experiment and found that in everyone, every 15 minutes of darkness, the cortisol level increased, rising to a peak around dawn and then the sunlight would lower it.
They found that if they could go to sleep during the darkness, the rate of cortisol rise was slowed. So, the darkness is stressful, increasing all of the stress hormones.
But sleep is our defense. Deep sleep is the best defense. When stress and malnutrition have lowered your hormones, for example, a hypothyroid person typically doesn't ever get into the deepest phase of sleep.
So, sleep isn't restorative to the proper extent if your thyroid or other hormones are low.
Among the stress hormones are the hormones that regulate sodium and calcium. One of the reasons those minerals are so protective is that sodium inhibits the rise of aldosterone from the adrenal glands and calcium inhibits the rise of parathyroid hormones.
These normally, along with all of the stress hormones, rise during the night. Aldosterone and parathyroid hormones interfere with mitochondrial energy production the same way polyunsaturated fats do, intensifying the problem of hypothyroidism or glucose deficiency.
Just by having some salty soup, for example, at bedtime or some source of sugar or a big dose of calcium, for example, a glass of milk at bedtime, the milk with its protein and sugar will help to inhibit the rise of the parathyroid hormone and cortisol.
The salty soup, especially if it has a lot of gelatin in it, the glycine and the glucose and sodium will help to prevent the rise of aldosterone, preventing these things from blocking the energy production during the night and lowering the stress hormones.
In a study of rabbits in Leningrad, where the nights were very long, they found that as the night progressed, the form and function of the mitochondria deteriorated.
Each hour, they would sample mitochondria. After about eight hours of darkness, the mitochondria first would swell and start to malfunction.
Then they would collapse and extrude their ingredients, disintegrate and absolutely stop functioning. Things that maintain the glucose supply and prevent the blocking hormones from rising will prevent that deterioration of mitochondria during the night.
Night and winter are where most aging degeneration takes place.
The parathyroid hormone, especially when your calcium intake and vitamin D are low, the parathyroid hormone takes calcium out of your bones to make it available for other uses, but it tends to create osteoporosis.
So, if you measure the urine calcium content in women around menopausal age, almost all of their daily loss of calcium taken out of the bones was in the morning urine.
Night was almost fully responsible for the development of osteoporosis, and that's because of the rise of parathyroid hormone.
Similar things happen to the other hormones, taking down different tissues, protein tissues are atrophied during the night.
In the context of all these amazing things, Ray, that you're talking about that can protect against the stress of darkness, what would you say or what are your thoughts about a pregnant woman or really anybody staying up late with a laptop computer on their lap or a cell phone in front of their face surfing the Internet?
Oh, well the cell phone and the whole environment that is supporting cell phone use, but especially having one near your head or your torso or pelvis, that's a very important factor.
And it is like the other harmful influences that are being sold by the industry, the various telephone, radio, television industries are doing pretty, pretty phony studies claiming that radiation
of that sort is completely harmless.
Already in the 1950s, they were saying that if the radiation doesn't increase your body temperature or the cell temperature, then it can have absolutely no effect.
But that was based on the crudest sort of basically science-free biological doctrine.
Already early in the 20th century, biologists have been demonstrating great sensitivity of cells to even weak electrical or radiant fields.
A Russian, Yuri Holodov, demonstrated that the gonads and the brain are the most sensitive of our tissues, but these are seldom the ones that telephone companies test for radio sensitivity.
And the way of measuring the reaction, if you are only looking for one kind of reaction such as a mutation of DNA, then it's going to take a tremendous amount of energy to produce that within the time that they are observing.
But, for example, the nuclear radiation from atomic bomb testing or various medical x-rays, for example, they would give a certain dose of x-ray or isotope poisoning and say, well, we didn't see any mutations, maybe some minor DNA breaks, but no functional mutations.
But they were limiting their observations to the cells that were directly exposed the time immediately following the exposure.
But when you look at the organism as a whole, as Yuri Holodov did, extremely weak x-ray poisoning, gamma ray poisoning, or isotope poisoning will change the whole organism, shrink the brain, change functioning.
The bystander effect refers to the fact that radiation can seem to totally bypass the DNA, absolutely cause no mutation in the cells you're exposing, or only a small change.
But those cells, having been poisoned, will, even years or decades later, will continue to be in a destabilized state so that the rate of mutation is higher, so-called spontaneous mutations, becomes higher when the cell is in this irritated, excited state.
And one cell, having been irradiated and excited, emits substances such as the whole range, including breakdown products of polyunsaturated fatty acids, but intrinsic hormones of all sorts.
The cell, having been irradiated, emits these small molecules that have a transmitting effect if they're being released into water by irradiated fish, for example.
Other fish swimming in that water will show the effects of irradiation, having absorbed these small pro-inflammatory molecules.
But in the body, a cell which is irradiated seemingly without much local damage is emitting these small, irritating particles, and surrounding cells receiving these particles through the body fluids are then destabilized, and they will start having DNA mutations.
So, when you hear about particular demonstrations of the harmlessness of a particular dose of radiation, the experiment is almost always set up to be blind to most, to about 95% of the actual effects of the radiation, which is delayed in time and remote in space through the organism.
So, from that perspective, a tremendous amount of the science is fraudulent, and much of it.
Chris Busby in England has outlined, he even had a criticism of some of the research published in the journal, I think it was Genetics, in December of last year.
It's very odd that it finally got published, but he showed that the history of radiation research has been deliberately avoiding seeing the worst effects.
My gosh. So, to round that up on irradiation, if we're looking to pave the way for a biologically energetic future, laying in bed with a cell phone right above the womb is probably not going to help much.
No, it's an energy drain, and the energy drain, even if it isn't ionizing radiation, the draining energy creates stress, and stressed cells send out the same bystander effects.
So, for example, in animal experiments, they would, first they noticed that irradiating the head would cause cancer to develop in other parts of the organism,
and they said, oh, that must be because it's causing changes in the pituitary gland, which causes hormonal changes affecting the rest of the organism.
But as the idea was investigated, other people irradiated only the feet, one foot of the animal, and it would cause, for example, an estrous condition,
showing that there was an increased estrogen effect on the organism just from irradiating its foot.
Wow. Ray, what about physical activity for a pregnant woman or exercise? Do you think there's some that could be helpful rather than harmful for a mom and her baby?
I think just free activity, whatever feels good. Muscle exertion helps to lower cortisol when it's free and pleasurable muscle exertion.
Awesome. You've done such a good job, Ray, I think, of really coming up with some specific and tangible ways that a woman or a family can help bring a young one into this world
in a way that the developing organism has a chance to be strong and resilient and adaptable.
I wanted to get a little bit more general here before we close. You mentioned Bertrand Russell earlier.
I recently read a quote. I actually have it up here. He said, "When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little.
You give them responsibilities, you talk to them candidly, you provide them privacy and solitude, and you make them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning.
That's if you want to teach them to think." I just thought in light of that and in light of the fact that you said you grew up in many ways being inspired by Bertrand Russell,
can you speak to if parents came to you and said, "How can I raise a child in this day and age so that they inhabit a future down the road that's safe, that's full of life, that's full of wonder?"
What kind of message could you send to parents?
>> Dr. Robert R. Reilly: Exactly what Bertrand Russell said. When I lived in Mexico, I noticed that kids were very different from how kids were being raised in the '50s and '60s in the U.S.
The idea of childhood was, I think, Piaget, the psychologist of child mentality, had convinced people that you should give kids age-appropriate information.
It went right with the regimented idea of education. In Mexico, I noticed that it was very common for adults to treat children as little adults.
I really liked kids in Mexico. They were little adults who were fully responsible and could be communicated with. In the U.S., kids seemed to be progressively getting crazier.
I think the U.S. culture is contributing, just the cultural component is contributing to autism.
If you communicate with little kids right from the earliest stages, maternal -- in Mexico, for example, babies typically were carried in a rebozo attached to the mother's body so that there was constant touch and movement.
The former NIH developmental psychologist, James W. Prescott, studied different cultures and found that cultures that were relatively free of violence and cruelty had, from a very early age, touched and held and moved their babies around continuously.
Where in the U.S., touching has been kind of institutionalized away. Babies were isolated from their mother at birth, sometimes for hours, and denied immediate skin contact.
Ashley Montagu argued exactly what James Prescott did in his study. Montagu wrote a book called Touch or Touching, a very good anthropologist view of mental development.
Continuous with that physical stimulation is people talking both to each other with an adult vocabulary and talking to the kids right from infancy to start treating them as adults.
Years ago, a girlfriend of mine had a kitten that had just been weaned, and she was talking baby talk to it.
Just kidding her, I said, "How do you expect such a little kitten to understand baby talk? You have to enunciate very clearly."
So I said to the kitten, "Aphrodite, go look at yourself in the mirror," which she had sort of slurred in baby talk. The kitten looked at me, ran over to the mirror, looked at itself, got back up.
She said, "Oh, that was just a coincidence. It's impossible." So several times after that, in the next several weeks, she would say, "Cats can't understand English, especially. How could a two-month-old cat understand those words?"
She tested me on increasingly ridiculous things. One was around Christmas. There were trimmings of a Christmas tree on the floor, and she challenged me to say, "Why don't you tell the cat to pick that up and go look at herself in the mirror?"
I told the cat to do that in clear English. The kitten looked at me, went over and grabbed this bristling fur twig, looked like a giant groucho mustache, and went over and looked at itself in the mirror holding that twig.
I'm sure kids are at least as intelligent as kittens. I think people, right from the day of birth, I think they should start talking to them.
I think you go right, just totally naturally right into my last question, which is how might play fit into all of this in terms of connecting the present with that ideal future that you kind of started with at the beginning?
What was the first part of the question? Your voice faded up.
Sorry. How might play factor into all this? It seems to be such an integral part of a developing organism, of learning, of evolution. How might play fit into all this?
I think everything should be play. Studying, you need to think of play as a property of life. It's a type of thinking, thinking and brain development.
If you want to solve a problem in physics, you have to play, at least mentally, play around with all kinds of things, play with objects, investigate things playfully. It's an attitude without which you don't have science, you have dogma.
That's wonderful. I love it. Ray, do you want to add anything to what we've talked about?
Oh, nothing occurs to me right now.
Where can a listener read more of your work or contact you directly if they wanted to?
My website, RayPeat.com.
Okay, awesome. Ray, I actually don't know how to say it enough, and I certainly don't have probably the appropriate words, but it's been just a pleasure hearing you and being able to do this with you, so thank you so much.
Okay, thank you.
All right, have a great afternoon.
Okay, you too. Bye.
Okay, bye.
Bye.
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